There was a sensation throughout his entire body, like drifting, gently swaying, through water.
Dark. An endlessly dark world.
No source of light could be found. He couldn't tell up from down, left from right. There was no sensation of his body touching anything, and before that even mattered, he couldn't feel his own limbs, his eyes, his ears—none of his sensory organs were functioning.
Even his consciousness was hazy, his thoughts refusing to settle.
Where am I? What am I? Why has it become like this?—Only aimless thoughts like these drifted and floated, weightless, through the void.
"…—ing it."
Suddenly, a voice reached him from the pitch-black.
His ears—his eardrums didn't even exist—heard it somehow, but it wasn't sound. It was consciousness itself, vibrating his thoughts directly. He strained to hear, swirling his awareness through the voiceless dark with no way to locate its source.
"…—loving you."
It was unbearably fragile, the kind of sound that squeezed the listener's heart with sorrow. And so his own heart, hearing it, was squeezed just as painfully, just as fiercely. Yet the sensation carried with it a strange, nostalgic comfort, evoking a tenderness so deep it brought tears to his eyes.
If he had fingers, he would reach out to the voice's owner.
If he had a mouth, he would call the voice's owner's name.
If he had arms, he would hold the voice's owner close and never let go.
If he had legs, he would run to the voice's owner's side.
If he had a body, he would never have to let the voice's owner go.
But right now, in this place, he was granted none of it—and that was so sad, so frustrating, so suffocating and agonizing and full of regret that it was unbearable.
"—I love you."
The same feeling.
The clearly formed word struck his emotions like a blow, making them tremble. The nonexistent mouth screamed the eruption of feeling at the top of its lungs.
The same feeling. No—it was more than that. No matter how much warmth had been accumulated, the searing desire for that person could never be matched.
Even if the other person felt the same way, his feelings would still be greater.
The love accelerated, racing against itself, and yet the one person who should receive it was nowhere to be found.
The swelling emotions, the overflowing tenderness, brought forth sins that could not be contained.
—The Sloth that could not wipe away tears of sorrow.
—The Lust that longed to melt together, to become one.
—The Gluttony that wanted to devour and steal everything.
—The Greed that loved, yearned, desired, and wanted to possess it all.
—The Wrath toward a world so cruel it would not permit any of it.
—The Pride that looked down on everything but her.
The space that had been dyed pitch-black was being filled and overwritten by an immense love.
His heart trembled. His soul screamed. His very existence—that formless self—was crying out for what it wanted.
To offer everything, to bare everything, to dissolve into this void and disappear. If only that were possible— "Really?"
Suddenly, the call shifted its color and shook his heart.
A question that tested his resolve. A question that asked whether he would affirm his feelings as they were, giving them shape.
Of course. Naturally. What was there to hesitate about? That was what he thought.
But even as he thought it, something was wrong. Something snagged. Something stopped his heart in its tracks.
There was confusion. There was hesitation. There was bewilderment. What on earth could make him falter this much— "Can you end it?"
—End it. That was impossible.
The question drew an immediate answer, for some reason.
The beginning, the end, what he had seen, what he had sought—he understood none of it.
He was drowning in things he didn't know, and only things he didn't know, yet his emotions rejected the idea of simply remaining ignorant.
He couldn't end it. He was never meant to end. It wasn't over. He wouldn't let it end.
"What do you want to do?"
He wanted to do something. He would make himself do something. Doing something was his— "Because it's what I'm supposed to do."
His voice came out.
Before he knew it, his feet were planted on the ground. He could feel his hands and feet. He understood himself clearly.
What he had left behind—he still didn't know what that was. But he knew that he had to run somewhere, that there was a place he had to reach.
"We can't meet yet."
"I know."
He didn't understand anything. But he knew that much.
He suppressed the impulse to reach out, turned his back on the voice, and began to run.
If he stopped even once, the longing pressing down on him would be so overwhelming that he'd never start running again. So he didn't look back. He didn't even turn his thoughts that way. He left it behind, abandoned it, drew farther and farther away—but someday, without fail, he would take that hand.
"—I love you."
The voice receded, and the world crumbled away like a skin peeling off.
Ahead—in the pitch-black world—a single point of white light, a white end, came into view.
He ran. He ran. He ran. He drew closer. And when he reached it— "Subaru-kun."
At the very last, he felt as though that beloved voice had called his name, and
"Huh?"
His name was called suddenly, and at the same time he felt a shoulder being shaken.
Rough, hard palms pushed against him, and Subaru's consciousness returned to reality.
—Along with that understanding, the horror that shot through Subaru's entire body was immeasurable.
In the span of just a few blinks, Subaru understood everything.
That the gap in his continuous consciousness—that blank—was already something he had experienced many times over: the erasure and rebirth that came from dying.
And that, "No way…!"
After all that struggle, after overcoming all that hardship, he had lost his life once again.
As a result, Subaru had fumbled every single thing he had gained on the way to reaching that point— "What's wrong, bro? Your eyes were totally blank just now, c'mon, get it together."
He whirled around, and right before him was Ricard's beast-faced mug, staring at him with suspicion. The stench of beast breath washed over his face, and Subaru reflexively— "Hands off, damn it!?"
"Ow—! What the hell, man?!"
He swatted the nose away with his arm without thinking, and Ricard, suddenly subjected to such violence, went cross-eyed. At Ricard's yelp, the surrounding gazes all turned toward them.
Among that storm of eyes—there was Julius.
Wilhelm stood there, his gaze filled with concern, and the sight of him made Subaru— "Ah…"
A breath left him, smooth and releasing. He let the tension drain from his shoulders, and only now, belatedly, realized that he had collapsed into a seated position on the bare ground.
Feeling the cold of the earth through his seat, Subaru lightly clenched his fist against the ground, confirming the gritty texture of grass and soil within his grip, and murmured: "The save point… updated, huh?"
Nine deaths and one life—he felt relief at that narrow escape, the kind of fortune found within misfortune, where not even a joke could do the situation justice.
Based on what those around him told him, it seemed Subaru had returned to a point after the battle with the
Right around the time he had delivered a casual lecture on "Witch Cult hunting, a monkey could do it," his consciousness had apparently tripped off to some other world right in front of them. In truth, since he had been regressing at that very moment, their interpretation wasn't wrong—but regardless.
"So I was done in by Petelgeuse… that's the gist of it, right? Well, not 'done in' exactly, but you get the idea."
Caught between the fortune of being able to return to this scene, and the misfortune of having been forced into "Return by Death" in the first place, Subaru wore a complicated expression.
Dying and returning was nothing but a failure on his part, but the fact that the return point was right here was the best possible outcome. In the worst case, he could have been sent back to stand in front of that surly greengrocer again—so the odds of that hadn't been insignificant.
"Come to think of it, I think the first time I also ended up back at the old man's place… What kind of cosmic link is that? Does this world have some kind of save point function built into that guy?"
It could be a payphone, or a mysterious crystal, or an old typewriter, or maybe even confessing to a church priest—there were all sorts of variations.
"When you think about it, the old man as a save point substitute is a fresh angle… Ricard's type is kind of similar too, and that connection brings us to the here and now?"
"What've you been doing, bro? Staring at people's faces like a creep. Something going on?"
"Nothing, really."
Subaru quickly looked away, exhaling so Ricard wouldn't catch his expression. He let the air out, steered his thoughts in a useful direction, and bought himself enough time to reduce the uncontrollable shaking in his fist to something he could just barely disguise.
The fear of death, the relief at having survived yet again despite losing his life—those certainly contributed to the trembling. But only partly.
What truly shook Subaru to his core was something else entirely—a different emotion. No, a fury.
The Sin Archbishop of Sloth, Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti—the undying rage he harbored toward that loathsome, most abhorrent enemy.
That was what was burning inside him now, an inferno of emotion he could no longer contain.
"Possession… that's what I should be thinking about. He abandoned his original body and jumped into someone else, and that's how he took down Wilhelm and
Subaru had witnessed the two of them—one man and one beast—die horribly, their necks twisted and broken. Immediately after, his consciousness had been hazy, and he couldn't clearly recall what he'd been thinking, but he knew the outcome of whatever actions he'd taken in that muddled state.
He had pulled the sacred sword from Wilhelm's corpse and driven it through his own throat.
He had indeed been shaken by the old swordsman's death, but Subaru was not so careless or cavalier with his own life that he would commit copycat suicide on impulse simply because he wanted to start over.
After consideration, it was possible he had chosen the same outcome because he wished for a redo, but even so, he should have thought it through more before doing it in that moment.
In other words, "As much as I don't want to believe it… that bastard got inside me."
The worst possible scenario on paper, and the lowest possible state of being in practice.
Of all the things in this world, he had been forced to share a body with the most despicable existence imaginable—and to make matters worse, if you only looked at the result, he had lost the battle for dominance and been made to kill himself.
For seventeen years, they had supposedly been vessel and soul, side by side—and yet he was being shown just how cold that relationship truly was. The body must have been promiscuous, accepting other souls left and right.
"That son of a bitch—I already thought he was the worst, but this pushes the gauge completely past the limit. What the hell am I supposed to do about this?"
Resting his chin in his hand, Subaru could only hold his breath at the horror of Petelgeuse's Authority.
If, hypothetically, the man could possess anyone without discrimination and extend his life by jumping into new hosts, then the inevitable eradication of his existence became impossible.
No matter how many times you killed him, if he jumped into someone nearby and survived, you would have to annihilate the entire human race to destroy him.
He wanted to believe that Petelgeuse didn't actually possess a cheat-like ability to that extreme, at least.
"In this kind of scenario, how do you even beat him? If there were conditions on the possession, that'd be the most straightforward thing to work with, but I can't even evaluate that. A usage limit… that's unknowable too."
If there were conditions on the possession, even gauging those would be difficult when everything was hypothetical.
The first body had been a thin, gaunt man. The next time he encountered the ability, it was a woman in her twenties. And the last was Subaru's own body. He couldn't find a common thread.
If there was a usage limit, that was equally troublesome—there was no way to know the cap, and under the current calculation, he would need to kill Petelgeuse at least three times before the man would actually die.
"If I knew I only had to kill him once, I could manage with Wilhelm's suggestion to fight him head-on… but without knowing the finish line, it becomes a war of attrition."
At this point, Subaru was coming to understand just how difficult it would be to fully defeat Petelgeuse.
In hindsight, the man's fearlessness about death had been hinting at this very possibility all along. In the other world, when
In the absolute worst case— "Maybe giving up on defeating Petelgeuse altogether is also an option…"
If the priority was Subaru's original objective, then that was certainly one of the means he could choose. It galled him to admit it, but it was the truth.
The reason Natsuki Subaru was heading for the Mathers domain in such a rush, bringing his companions back with all due speed, was precisely this. More than annihilating the Witch Cult, what he wanted—what he wanted with all his heart—was to save the people of the village and the mansion.
There had been a time when even that conviction wavered, when hatred of the Witch Cult drove him to make their annihilation his supreme objective and pursue vengeance—but now that fury had gone quiet.
The one who had given Subaru the clarity to think this way was none other than the silver-haired girl.
Without her devotion, Subaru would still be wandering in the deep dark, lost without even an exit, his heart grinding itself to dust.
What that girl had said to Subaru was not "defeat them for me."
It was "Don't give up on the lives of the people you care about."
It was humiliation. The urge to gnash his teeth in frustration was unbearable.
But that, too, was one method Subaru could employ—no, it was the one form of salvation only Subaru could provide.
Only Subaru, who knew of the Witch Cult's attack, could act preemptively to rescue
Above all, they had defeated the White Whale, and the alliance was still holding.
This time, he simply wasn't prepared enough to defeat Sloth. If he prepared in advance, devised a strategy the same way he had for the White Whale, then the opportunity to destroy Petelgeuse would come on its own.
So— "Subaru."
A quiet voice called his name, and Subaru, who had been sinking into a sea of thought, raised his face.
Directly ahead, Wilhelm was watching him with eyes so clear they seemed to reflect the surface of a lake. His heart leaped. It felt as though the man could see straight through to his very core.
"Is something troubling you?"
"Ah, no…"
"If something weighs on you, speak it. There is no need to carry it alone."
As Subaru faltered, Wilhelm pressed on as though he already knew.
The others nearby noticed their exchange, and gazes began to converge on Subaru.
Uncomfortable under the weight of those stares, Subaru shook his head slightly.
"It's not that. I was just trying to sort out my thoughts. I wouldn't be making much sense if I started talking in this state, right? So…"
"So you were considering the option of giving up?"
"Giving up—no, it's not like that…"
Though gently, Wilhelm had essentially shot down one of his considerations, and Subaru grimaced. Giving up was the wrong way to put it. Subaru simply didn't want to lose sight of his goal.
Because he had lost sight of it before, he had let so many things slip through his fingers, and now that he'd been given the chance to start over, he wanted—more than anything—not to let it fall from his grasp again.
But as for Subaru's thoughts— "Subaru. I realize it is the height of indelicacy for me to say this, but permit me to speak."
"O-oh. When you get all formal like that, it's kind of intimidating. Sure, I'm listening."
"—Fight."
Low, it was a word that shook the very air.
And yet Subaru's body, his heart, his soul truly trembled.
He opened his eyes. Wilhelm—the Sword Demon—was gazing straight at him.
The murderous aura that leaked from his entire being enveloped Subaru completely, seizing him and refusing to let go.
"If you have resolved to fight, to resist—then fight with everything you have. Do not surrender hope for a single instant, a single second, not even for the span of a breath. Cling greedily to the singular point of victory you have set your sights on. Compromise must not exist. It must not be permitted. If you can still stand, then stand. If your fingers still move, then move them. If your fangs are not yet broken—then stand. Stand. Stand. Stand. Fight. —Fight."
"——"
It was remarkably similar to the words Wilhelm had once given him.
In the garden of Crusch's mansion, after Subaru had been beaten senseless with a wooden sword, Wilhelm had shown him a glimpse of the Sword Demon in that singular moment and spoken of the warrior's resolve.
Back then, Wilhelm had called Subaru "a man with no intention of growing stronger," and indeed Subaru hadn't truly faced him with sincerity.
But now, it was different. He believed it was different.
He wanted it to be different. He was striving to make it different. That was what he believed.
"So you're telling me… not to compromise?"
"Yes. No matter how harsh the path may be."
"When I chose to fight, I dragged a lot of people into the battle against the White Whale. And now, by choosing to fight again, I'm dragging everyone here into it too. —People are going to die."
Speaking the words aloud, he could feel his own courage shrinking.
Other people's lives were weighing on Subaru's judgment, on his thoughts, on his actions. It had always been this way, and only now was he fully aware of it.
The battle against the White Whale had still been shaped by Crusch's strategic interests. The sacrifices born of that fight—the weight of those lives—had rested on the shoulders of both Subaru and Crusch.
But the battles ahead were different. These were fights Subaru had chosen, Subaru had wanted, Subaru had dragged others into—and fought anyway.
Every life of every person standing around him in this battle—each one was a burden Subaru had to bear. This was not about duty or obligation. It was a matter of the soul, of pride.
"Even so, you're willing to go along with my selfishness? You'll entrust your lives—greedy, petty, selfish as I am?"
"What else would you expect?"
At Subaru's question, born of resolve, Wilhelm even allowed himself a small smile.
Looking around, the others wore the same expression as they watched him. Only Ferris had a sour look on his face—which was entirely like him.
Surrounded by those gazes, unable to move, Subaru watched as Wilhelm gave a slight nod: "To act in order to protect what you wish to protect—that is, in and of itself, the way of a knight. Therefore, as one who shares that aspiration, who among us could object to the path you choose to walk?"
"——!"
At Wilhelm's words, every knight among them drew their sword in unison.
The beast-race mercenaries, reacting a beat late, saw this display and exchanged wry smiles—every one of them—and then, in answer, drew their own weapons and raised them lightly.
"We understand the frustration of having the will but lacking the strength. —That is precisely why we are here. Right now, we are your sword, Subaru. We are the power that will grant your wish."
"A sword…"
"Let us do what must be done. Not for anyone else. For your own—not your selfishness, but your own true wish."
Something that had been lodged in his chest dropped away.
It was the exact sensation of the dark thoughts that had been coiling around Subaru clearing away, and in its place, what welled up was an almost ticklish embarrassment.
—And above all, a sense of bliss at being so utterly relied upon.
"I have to save Emilia and the others."
"Yes."
"But I also have to stand up to the Witch Cult. That's the honest truth."
"Yes."
"Truth is, I was thinking it might be better to run. There's a good chance this fight is going to be even more of a pain than I expected. At the very least, just knowing they're coming is already a stroke of luck—so maybe fleeing isn't such a bad call?"
The Subaru from moments ago would have chosen that option, without question.
He would have reconciled his emotions with convincing logic, taken the second-best path, and fought on until he reached some acceptable outcome.
But the knights before him—every one of them—had affirmed Subaru.
If he turned away from that—could he even call himself a man?
"This is the only chance we'll get to take down Sloth. There's no telling when he'll strike again, or what form he'll take next."
"——"
"I have to finish him here. —Without fail."
Putting it off, escaping just this once—there was no guarantee that would spare him from that monster's reach. Petelgeuse was tenacious. Without question, he would extend that demonic hand toward Subaru again, in some form Subaru couldn't predict. And when that happened, Subaru might not be in a position to be there in time.
An opportunity like this would never come again. That was what he had to believe.
And the arrogance of believing there would be a next time, the false wisdom of settling for second-best— "I'll save Emilia. I'll crush the Witch Cult. Having to do both—that's the hard part. Are you ready? I've… finally made up my mind."
"Then shall we set out?"
"Yeah, let's go. It's a race against time. I'll sort out my thoughts on the way."
There were still things he had to think about, obstacles he had to overcome, hardships he had to surpass—standing in Subaru's path.
But even so, there were people who would lend their strength to him, who was powerless. There was a girl who would support his weak-willed heart. —Because of them, he could keep his head up and look forward.
He would defy fate. He would resist Sloth.
He would face his own Sloth—the part of him that wanted to take the easy way out, to flee toward weakness.
To fight. To live. That was what it meant.
To slay Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti, the Archbishop of Sloth—Natsuki Subaru's— ——Natsuki Subaru and his companions' battle begins anew.